It will be a version plucked from before some unfortunate event that dimmed a light inside me, that character relentlessly grasping for the pioneering angle, striving for unseen avenues and the thrill, but also grafting to unlock the innate change. In the many layers of my hardended self, I know that is the complete me, now reined in by years of failed hope, where half-successes became no more or hovered in the air, only to be frozen there as clipped efforts and superseded by the chaos of spiralling events.
This burning future will ‘powder-puff’ the desired alternate phase, the one I prayed would eventually be summoned due to some quirk of written truth. In the pure madness of this a better result may actually be possible. Some ego double. I will remove the reins, and that incarnation of me I always threatened to unleash will in turn dominate reality, no longer just a dream character in my mind.
the slumber-tinctured light
In that unrivalled spring, if it comes, when it comes, I will forget that I was ever defeated, that I came a hair’s-breadth close to a life-validating win, in a city where every movement was meaningful and the slumber-tinctured light doused the perfect monuments in shades befitting some romantic era. I’ll transmit the aura of what would have happened in some alternate timeline, with no regrets, if my planned curve had materialised, twinning maximum joy to historic landmarks beside shaking waters.
It’ll appear as though that journey was the single possible one, and never the regrettable second route that unravelled when I realised the ultimate opportunity had vanished. One extra reason to unwrap my true behemoth, for that deserved warp in time!
Yet notions of the next phase are fantasy. I am inside a moving landscape, knowing that there is no fixed ‘ahead’, and whatever vision of it I conjure, the true map for the coming hours and days will smash it. So, the image of a renewed destiny may well be deeply deluded anyway. Just like a smudgy prize in my peripheral vision, one that remains there, moving whenever I tilt my head to better clock it.
© Copyright 2021 John Maher